New Article: Managing and Testing Topics, Queues and Relay Services with the Service Bus Explorer Tool

The Windows Azure Service Bus Community Technology Preview (CTP), which was released in May 2011, first introduced queues and topics. At that time, the Windows Azure Management Portal didn’t provide a user interface to administer, create and delete messaging entities and the only way to accomplish this task was using the .NET or REST API. For this reason, I decided to build a tool called Service Bus Explorer that would allow developers and system administrators to connect to a Service Bus namespace and administer its messaging entities.

Over the last few months I continued to develop this tool and add new features with the intended goal to facilitate the development and administration of new Service Bus-enabled applications. In the meantime, the Windows Azure Management Portal introduced the ability for a user to create queues, topics, and subscriptions and define their properties, but not to define or display rules for an existing subscription. Besides, the Service Bus Explorer enables to accomplish functionalities, such as importing, exporting and testing entities, which are not currently provided by the Windows Azure Management Portal. For this reason, the Service Bus Explorer tool represents the perfect companion for the official Windows Azure portal, and it can also be used to explore the features (session-based correlation, configurable detection of duplicate messages, deferring messages, etc.) provided out-of-the-box by the Service Bus brokered messaging.

I’ve just published a post where I explain the functioning and implementation details of my tool, whose source code is available on MSDN Code Gallery. In this post I explain how to use my tool to manage and test Queues and Topics.

For more information on the Windows Azure Service Bus, please refer to the following resources: